Don’t you ever use birdbrain as a pejorative again!

People who use said term have apparently never interacted with a crow or raven. In some ways, in fact, crows are as or more intelligent than humans.

Having a birdbrain is no bad thing. (Wikimedia)

The following video, which shows a crow completing a complicated set of tests to obtain a bit of food, is frankly rather amazing:

I’m not sure whether some humans I know could solve that puzzle. The eight-part test solved by the bird was featured on BBC Two’s Inside the Animal Mind.

Previous research has established that although crows have very different brains from primates they can make strategic decisions in much the same way. It suggests a parallel evolutionary track in intelligence and makes me wonder if humans hadn’t gotten their act together 50,000 years or so whether we’d be ruled by birds today.

NOTE: In case you missed it, check out this awesome video of a crow just wanting to have a little fun on the slopes.

Good find JohnD. At the Bear Creek park in the Addiicks reservoir west of Houston they have a small zoo like area with birds in large cages. One of these birds is a large white parrot like looking bird. There is a circular gizmo made of plastic links hanging around one of its branch like perches. This bird gets on top of this device and pulls it around the branch with its feet until it makes a complete circle or more. I can’t figure out if this bird is just bored (a good possibility) or what but it is interesting to watch this maneuver. Oh and if this bird thinks you are good looking it will give you the cat call. : )

Wonderful! Pecans wee a large part of Dad’s income & we considered crows ‘the enemy’ when they showed up in huge flocks. But we had a hate/love relation with the birds because they are so smart. They were always fascinating. Unfortunately West Nile has killed many crows. I no longer see the huge flocks.

I have over 30 feeders on one piece of property in Washington Co. The birds that winter there recognize my truck and me. Some (kinglets, chickadees, & titmice) come so near I could almost reach out and touch them. Cardinals, nuthatches, Mockingbirds, & several species of sparrows & woodpeckers also come near, but usually no closer than 10 yards. Other species of sparrows do not come near but when I drive off after filling certain feeders, they arrive almost immediately.

Their instinctive behavior is also interesting. On 2/10 a wonderful red shouldered hawk stayed around our yard (here in town). He shows up several times every winter. All the birds disappeared. On the 11th, not a bird was seen or heard. On the 12th a couple of mockingbirds showed up, followed by English sparrows, then late in the day blue jays came around. Cardinals showed up very late. The doves didn’t show up until the 13.

It goes to show that what passes for “intelligence” in one context is quite different from what people assume intelligence is. The idea that technology, for example, is THE measure of intelligence of a species, is belied by what we know about intelligence here on our own planet. The Universe could be teeming with intelligence, yet not be teeming with technology. We create our gods in our own image to assume that perfection is what we do, only better. But look around. Do you think birds have celebrities that they worship, or fake wrestling matches they watch? Do dolphins kill over religion? What makes us think that Humans are the measure of what it is to be smart?

Back when I was in college studying Physics, my partner in Physics Lab was a crow, a real crow, the bird, the subject of this blog. She was smart, the lab equipment wads primitive so she would use a slide rule to back-calculate what instrument readings we should get to arrive at the correct parameters of the experiment. Yes, I have known for a long time that crows are smarter than many humans! I’m glad that others are learning that too.

Eric…Should I use Monarch butterfly brain as a pejorative? When I travel across town to a new area, I use my key map and still need help sometimes. When migrating to Mexico, why are they more successful then most of us, in arriving at the designated place ?

What’s fascinating to be is how small a crow’s brain is compared to those of mammals’. I feel certain that they have a mechanism that either purges or avoids recording redundant memory. That’s how they can have a cerebrum the size of a pea yet still be technosentient.

compare the space it took to store a kilobyte of memory in 1960 to how much it takes to store a gigabyte today to tell that size is not all there is to data storage. The crow could not fly if it had an ape-sized brain, so perhaps it evolved not to need one.

Regarding the bee dance comments, I have several times seen bees return to where a source of food used to be, after it had been moved. They would discover something in a trash can on the parking lot. I would move the can to change the bag later after the bees left. I only moved the can about 10 feet (it was swarming with bees after all). The bees would continue to arrive at the spot where the can had been for the better part of an hour, long after the can had been abandoned. The bees apparently were communicating where they had found the food, not where they had left it.

There are no end to the putdowns we humans use for various animals and other living things to make the user appear smart or funny. No doubt if the whole truth was understood the opposite would be the case.